Former People : The Final Days of the Russian Aristocracy

from xuebi

Douglas Smith has written a fascinating and informative account of the end of the Russian aristocracy during the early twentieth century. The story of how an entire class of people were subjected to brutal and often arbitrary repression is heart-breaking - even more so as Smith focuses on two fam...

from sscarllet

Russia is such an interesting and almost mysterious country. This book makes a sometimes shadowy time in history come alive and tells stories of people who were long forgotten.I sometimes struggle with books about the guy on top being overthrown by the little guy. The way the Russian peasants liv...

from Clara53

"Former people" - the very phrase invokes ghostly images. And though it's a rather loose translation of the Russian word "lishentzy" - meaning "people without any rights in the society", it's an adequate phrase, in the light of events portrayed in the book, to describe former nobles and aristocra...

from briandrewz

A haunting look at the days following the Russian Revolution of 1917 and what happened to the aristocrats of Russia's old order. The story isn't a happy one. Douglas Smith has given us a book that tells of the struggle to survive of the Russian aristocracy following the fall of Tsarist Russia. Ma...

from delphica

I confess when I first picked this up at the library, I was thinking it was going to be a Downton Abbey but with Russians kind of a book, and then it turned out to be a more serious history, with historical analysis and everything, so more of a dense read than I was expecting. But still awesome! ...